Motion Estimation and Motion Compensation (MEMC) technology is a popular video processing technique to reduce film judder and motion blur effects when watching film or video. Movies are shot at 24 frames per second, and other display devices often show them at higher frame rates. The higher frame rates result from frame interpolation, in which new frames of data are generated between the existing frames of data. MEMC reduces the motion blur that may happen with moving objects between the frames of original data, and can reduce the film judder. Film judder makes movements look slightly jerky in addition to the blur when displayed.
Unfortunately, while MEMC reduces the judder and motion blur, it also changes the look and feel of a scene, significantly altering the scene's emotional impact. This change is often referred to as the Soap Opera Effect (SOE) because it causes the cinematic feel of a movie to degrade to something that was shot using a low budget video camera. However, while the audience is used to seeing content that was shot at 24 frames per second, the low frame rate can sometimes cause artifacts that distract from the image. If a way existed to eliminate these distractions, the director would probably use it.
Current methods of making these adjustments gives the user control of how smooth the MEMC process will work, but without regard to the actual content of the scene. Typically, the user selects a setting for the display and the system applies that setting for all content. The only exception that usually exists applies to frames or regions where the MEMC process detects that it has not found the true motion vectors. When this happens, the MEMC process enters a fall back mode, such as some level of MEMC between the user setting and just doing a full frame repeat to generate the missing frames. This is unsatisfactory because no single setting can result in the correct tradeoff between judder and SOE artifacts for all the different types of content in a scene.